I'll have to look for the transcript for it.

Did they talk about the fact that when the EV1 came out, the batteries were the reason why it was commercial unviable to manufacture them? And I don't mean some grand industrial conspiracy, I mean that if they tried to sell, rather than rent at a loss, the things they might have sold them to the kinds of people who buy Segways. Ask Dean Kamen sometime how well that's working out for him.

Add in the fact that they had lousy range and low top speed due to thier weight, thier batteries were much more sensative to tempurature fluctuations compaired to what a hybrid uses, the required maintence level (think jet aircraft levels of hanger vs operations time), and that they had about as much room in them as a small pickup, and it just wouldn't not have worked. People would not have bought them. Keep in mind what I mentioned above- GM owned every single one of the EV1s, and they leased them. They took a bath. Great concept. I saw one displayed at the Tour de Sol one year. But concept. Just like GM's hydrogen "skateboard" that they are playing with right now. GM can't get thier designers to stop thinking about a big revolution. As a result, they will loose, beucase they want to make big leaps onto technology that is neither ready for widespread operation nor supportable by existing infrastructure.

I've found PBS' quality of source to loosing ground over the past few years; NPR hasn't had that problem. It sounds like they are cooking up a "grassy knole" where there is non.

Oh, and I hate to point this out but "plug-in hybrid" is an oxymoron. Hybrids generate thier own electricity by the burning of a combustable, be it a petrochem distillates, ethanol, methanol, solid biomass (saw one prototype generator once that burned cow chips- eww), methane or hydrogen. A pure electric car needs to be plugged in. That is why a hybrid is, well, a hybrid.